Salim Badakhchani | Certified I.T. professional, with over 20 years of experience, specialising in the banking and telecommunications industry. Passionate supporter of Community Software developed under Free and Open Source (FOSS) licenses and an early adopter and advocate of those technologies. Strong all rounder with broad industry experience spanning development and operations. Expert in defining process, documenting work flow, identifying best practice and developing tooling for automation.
Authored Comments
I think there are a number of issues here. Free Software existed before Open Source. The Open Source Initiative came about from a similar complaint that people have expressed about the term "open" only they had it about the term "free". So you see its not the first time this has happened. Now one can argue if it was the right thing to too do and depending on your values you will arrive at either the free software camp or the open source camp or you wont care.
What is being proposed here, at least from the business sales perspective is that we can do better if we change the word "open". This has largely come about because the markets that we sell software in have expanded and the word "open" is failing to translate well in those markets. That is a simple enough concept to grasp whether or not you agree with it or not. I guess open source has become a victim of its own success in these cases.
With respect to your last point well all I can say is that we wanted to start a conversation about re-branding and see if other people think its worth pursuing. What you imagine is or is not possible, with respect, is not relevant. People will either organise to effect the change if they believe its in their interest to do so or they wont.
So in starting this conversation we have found that there are people who think that they could benefit from such a change and surprisingly for us its not just about the bottom line. As I commented on a previous post some companies have expressed an interest in a more inclusive term to describe what they do. You see the software is just a part of the overall service that these solution providers provide. One really interesting thing I have heard so far is that they want to a term to express the diversity of their corporate cultures. I see the value in that. If you think this is suspicious then you need to say why and provide some evidence to make your case.
Open source is relates to the compliance of a software license with respect to the definition that Open Source Initiative has set. In the same way that the term Free software refers to software licenses that comply with the definition given by the Free Software Foundation. I think what is proposed by the term Community Software is that it is software that complies with existing standards as defined by FOSS. We are just using an "arguably" less ambiguous term to refer to it. A re-branding of FOSS is being proposed.